Occupying the middle ground

George Howard wrote ever such an interesting piece on the Occupy protests the other week. You remember? It was the one that kept using the word socialist to describe a bunch of people expressing an opinion. You don’t remember. That’s alright, it’s not really necessary for what I’m going to say anyway. Let’s begin with the Occupy protests, and leave George to one side for a while.

The Occupy protests are interesting. I’ve long since stopped reading Internet news-wheel Reddit thanks to an increasing torrent of people using it to post opinions they know others will slavishly massage back at them, and a lot of this came down to posts about the Occupy protests. The protests were right, Reddit said. Everyone else was wrong, Reddit said. That was that. It’s a special brand of single-mindedness, which, to me, almost always indicates someone who has not really thought through what they are doing.

Despite this, the Occupy protests have interesting points. If you go to the homepage of Occupy London Stock Exchange and look at their public statement, the first point is simple and concise, and mostly apolitical. It’s a simple statement of opinion, and it reads: “The current system is unsustainable.” These people are protesting because they believe the people who have the capacity to change the current system are also the people who stand to lose least from the way the system is currently running. That is not the statement of a socialist. That is the statement of someone who has a concern about the way a government is being run.

If you think the answer to any of our future problems lies in just the one ideological textbook, then you’re going to do more harm than good.

Socialism is a talk for another day, but – and George, you can come back now, thanks for waiting – whenever it is to be used in conversation it cannot be used as a vague cudgel with which to smack around arguments. You don’t have to be socialist to object to government action. You merely have to have an opinion, and a voice.

I don’t think people have to stay out in the cold at night to make use of their voice (incidentally, the thermal-scanning of the tents was debunked a few days later as fraudulent), and I don’t think people have to be nice, clean, well-dressed and well-behaved people in order to be allowed to hold an opinion. If we were allowed to expel people from society for the way they looked then I’d have exiled any and all people who decided a white shirt under a jumper looked ‘trendy’ at the start of the century. But that doesn’t make the people who wear those shirt/jumper combos less justified in holding an opinion. It just makes them look like a sixth-form student who recently discovered Marks and Spencer.

George’s article is troubling. Like many people who hold views similar to him, George is interested in attacking the people behind the protests, their ways of life, their standards of living, their worth as people – instead of looking at the reasons for their protests, and discussing those issues properly. This isn’t troubling because it’s poor journalism – that would be rich coming from the man who wrote six hundred words comparing porridge to atheism. It’s troubling because Imperial, unlike other places where such matters might be discussed by people our age, actually contains many of the people who will go on to make up the 1% in decades to come.

While I joke on an almost weekly basis about my reasons for despising all of you, the truth is that there are moments of genuine disgust as I read Twitter, Felix or listen in to conversations in the JCR. Many of you aren’t just humourously dislikeable. You’re worryingly single-minded. That goes for both sides of the political spectrum, whether you cry socialists when people express opinions that differ from yours, or cheer on the Occupy protests as evidence that the Government was out to get you all along. If you think the answer to any of our future problems lies in just the one ideological textbook, then you’re going to do more harm than good.

Think I’m wrong about the Occupy protests? Do you think the shirt/jumper combination helps you score with the ladies? Feed me your wrong opinions at: anangrygeek@gmail.com